A critic at film festivals is much like a buffet diner: he has to select from the array of dishes placed before him; a difficult choice especially at one that offers as varied and rich a feast as the Thessaloniki international film festival. As such, I decided that when in Rome, so to speak, I would focus on the selection of Greek films. It proved a bad move.

Greece makes an average of 25 fiction films and documentary features per year, and almost all of them were proudly on display in Thessaloniki. Every country wants to prove that its film industry is thriving - and Greece is no exception - but presenting this in the context of a film festival generally results in quantity, not quality. Despite this prior knowledge, I intrepidly embarked on my Greek odyssey.

Among the offerings was Dying in Athens, about a man with leukaemia given only a few months to live, much to the consternation of his wife and two lovers. What could have been a tragicomedy of how a man tries to arrange his life in the face of death turns into a sub-Jacques Demy musical with the characters bursting into ghastly Greek pop songs while fey dancers perform kitsch ballets in the background.

Extended Play was a crass "comedy" about a jealous man killed in a road accident who is given five minutes to materialise once again and spy on his fiancee. There were also two films, like several recently, that consist of a series of vaguely interrelated characters, a conceit perfected by the late lamented Robert Altman, but now rather hackneyed. Slightly more interesting, but no less conventional, was Akamas, which created some waves in Greece because it tells the love story between a Turkish Muslim boy and a Greek Catholic girl in Cyprus during British colonial rule (the British soldiers are shown to be quite as brutal oppressors as in Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley.)

Just as I was about to give up and sneak off to more tempting films in the other sections - a comprehensive Wim Wenders retrospective, a homage to Brazilian cinema, new Chinese cinema and the films of Czech fantasist Jan Svankmajer -along came an excellent Greek film (albeit a co-production with Germany and mostly in Albanian) that could happily stand in any company.

Eduart, directed by Angeliki Antoniou, and given its world premiere in Thessaloniki, is based on the true story of a young Albanian man (played by Eshref Durmishi) serving a sentence for murder in an Athens prison. The film follows his flight from Greece back to Albania after strangling a man who tried to have sex with him, his imprisonment for theft, his life in prison (during which he is raped) and his escape during the 1997 riots. During the journey, both literal and metaphorical, Eduart, with the help of a German doctor, learns to feel sympathy for others and guilt for his crime.

This extremely powerful and moving film is not in any way as worthy or sentimental as it sounds; nor, like its Dostoevskian hero, does it take the easy path to final redemption. It also manages to avoid most of the cliches of the brutal prison genre: instead of the documentary realism that is usual with such subjects, it is beautifully shot and framed with a discreet use of music. The film owes a tremendous amount to the central performance by Durmishi, an Albanian actor whose handsome, tortured features dominate almost every scene. Both he and the film could go on to achieve international success.

Like most European films today Eduart is a co-production, no doubt the consequence of many discussions and hard bargaining of the sort that goes on at many festivals. At Thessaloniki, there was Crossroads, a co-production forum that brought together producers, distributors, agents and other film specialists. The festival, now in its 47th year, has also initiated exciting projects such as the Balkan film fund, which offers development grants to the region's film-makers, one happy result of which was the Bosnian Grbavica, winner of the Golden Bear at this year's Berlin film festival.

Away from the packed houses and the schmoozing and boozing, it was a pleasure to contemplate the various photographic exhibitions that featured at the festival. One was Still Images of Moving Pictures, a collection of photographs by Wim Wenders and his wife Donata, taken on various films sets and locations. Some of the more intimate photos included a shot of Wenders and Francis Ford Coppola swimming in a Nevada river while an amused Akira Kurosawa looked on, and a raddled Nicholas Ray, a few years from his death, warmly greeting Wenders and Dennis Hopper.

At another location were Krzystof Kieslowski's photos of the people of Lodz, taken between 1965 and 1966, when the future director was at the celebrated film school there. Finally, the stunning photos by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose splendid Climates will soon be released in the UK. All in colour and in the shape of a Cinemascope screen, they take as their subject the Turkish landscape, transformed into eerie, dream-like frescoes which one critic compared to the work of Pieter Brueghel. Almost worth the trip to Thessaloniki alone.